National Post (National Edition)
‘Anything was possible’
MOUNTIES RELIVE DEADLY SHOOTINGS AT LABOUR CODE TRIAL
It was a sunny summer evening in Moncton’s northwest end. After a streak of rain, temperatures had climbed, and people had filled the streets, basking in the warmth.
As children played outside, a camouflaged man was spotted skulking down the middle of a road carrying what appeared to be two long guns, raising enough suspicion for several people to call 911.
Const. Fabrice Gevaudan took the lead as officers chased the suspect into the woods, Const. Shelly Mitchell said. Mitchell shooed a group of children to get in their homes and pushed ahead with her weapon drawn.
Then came the first round of gunfire.
“In that moment, it was very real,” Mitchell said. “This was really happening.”
In the next 20 minutes, Gevaudan and two other Mounties were shot dead. Two more officers were wounded in the June 2014 massacre, and Mitchell said she hasn’t been operational since then.
Nearly three years later, the RCMP and several of its officers sat on opposite sides of the aisle in a Moncton provincial courtroom at the force’s Labour Code trial last week. The trial will resume Monday. It’s alleged the RCMP failed to provide members and supervisors with the appropriate information, instruction and training in an active-shooter event, and didn’t give members the appropriate equipment.
Several Mounties who responded to the scene teared up on the stand as they relived the night of Justin Bourque’s shooting rampage.
They described futilely trying to revive wounded colleagues, feeling out-armed by a gunman out to assassinate police, and fearing they would be his next target.
Cpl. Peter MacLean, who was team leader at the scene, testified that he found Gevaudan lying face down in a backyard with his weapon next to him on the ground. He said he turned the 45-year-old officer over and saw he had been shot twice in the torso.
MacLean said he peeled off Gevaudan’s vest and tried to stop the bleeding. Gevaudan wasn’t breathing, but MacLean said he thought he felt a weak pulse in the officer’s neck.
MacLean told the court he was performing CPR when he heard a second volley of shots.
Court heard that as the shooting unfolded, people swarmed the neighbourhood to see what was happening. Officers said they frantically screamed for residents to get inside, but the gunman wasn’t aiming at them. It wasn’t civilians he was after, they said.
Mounties testified that they used the suburban landscape to conceal themselves while tracking the shooter. Officers jumped over fences, darted through unfenced backyards and covered each other as they hopscotched from house to house.
“I had a sense that anything was possible,” Mitchell told the court. “At any moment in time, this person could be barrelling out of the woods at us.”
Mitchell joined a group of officers who were gathered near the bullet-riddled SUV as Const. David Ross lay on the ground. He had been shot in the head, she told the court through tears.
Mitchell said she went behind a house and knocked on the patio door to ask the couple inside if she could borrow the keys to their car.
She told the court her plan: “If I see this person, I’m going to mow him down with this car.”
Disguised in a non-police vehicle, Mitchell said she learned that Const. Eric Dubois had been wounded by gunfire, so she picked him up and took him to the hospital.
Dubois gave her his pistol, and Mitchell tucked it into her vest and made her way back to the scene.
“The sense of urgency to move forward seemed most important,” she said. “He had killed my friends, my co-workers. And I wanted to stop him.”
Const. Erik White told the court that officers set up a staging area in a fire station. He said he heard gunfire in the distance, and then a call came in that a civilian was down.
As he dashed from car to car, White said a civilian pointed for him to keep going until he saw a group of people huddled around an open-doored car.
White said he pushed his way through the crowd and saw a body covered by a sleeping bag.
“It’s one of yours,” White recalled a civilian saying. “It’s a cop.”
White said he and a civilian dragged Const. Doug Larche, who was in plain clothes and body armour, off the street. They took him to a house.
White said he gathered Larche’s firearms and contacted the RCMP’s Codiac headquarters.
Cpl. Jacques Cloutier asked if he should send an ambulance, White recounted, and he told him “there’s no point.”
Cloutier, who was filling in as staff sergeant while the command post remained open, testified that he let the phone ring off the hook as he listened to the staticky police radio and tried to piece together what was happening on the ground.
As the nature of the threat became clear, Cloutier said he sent everyone in his office and holdovers from the previous shift to the scene without a briefing.
He told the court that he saw his primary role in the response as allocating resources, and officers kept pleading for more.
Const. Darlene Goguen of the RCMP’s Riverview detachment testified that she pulled up to the scene not knowing where the shooter was until the bullets pierced the window of her car.
Having been shot twice, Goguen recalled feeling blood streaming down her body as she drove until she couldn’t drive any further.
Goguen said she didn’t want other officers to risk their lives trying to save her, and an ambulance wasn’t coming.
Goguen called her boyfriend, but he didn’t pick up, and feeling faint, she let the call ring through to voice mail.
Court heard that in the recording, Goguen spoke with her deceased mother, unsure how much time she had left.
“(I was) just asking her to be with me, because I was alone,” said Goguen.
After a 28-hour manhunt, Bourque would come out of hiding and surrender to police with his hands up.